Step 6: The fun stuff!

Step 7: Video

Step 8: Various improvements

Since the original posting, I've modified the table and built some new elements for the upper portion. First, I needed higher outside walls. The adde...

This is a tabletop pinball machine made from all scrap wood and bits and pieces of things I've held onto just waiting for a project like this.

The ball is from an old computer mouse, with the rubber coating removed (you could use a marble as well). A crafty person should never throw perfectly good stuff in the trash. Just hang onto it, and eventually you'll find a new use for it down the road!

With some parental help, this can be a kid-friendly project. Building a solid table with a functioning paddle assembly requires some basic woodworking skills, and may be fairly difficult without proper guidance and appropriate tools. But once the paddle assemblies are in place, just about anyone can build ramps and jumps or anything else they can imagine for the upper part of the table. To me that's where the real fun lies--creating various obstacles and then seeing a ball bounce around all over and through them, somewhat under your power.

This is a great project for parents and kids to take on together!

Please check out the video at the end of the instructable to see it in action.

Step 1: Table top

I have included measurements where I can. Most of this was made through trial and error, with lots of adjustments to make things work the way I wanted. If you plan to make one, depending on the materials you use, you may need to do a bit of measuring and tinkering to work out some of the details on your own.

This should be a helpful guide though, to show you how it can be done.

The table top is a piece of melamine which used to be part of a large router table top. It had numerous screw holes in it that I filled with putty. The dimensions are 36" by 20", not including the sides. The sides are 3/4" plywood that was ripped into 2 1/2-inch wide pieces.

The sides are attached to the piece of melamine with screws. To get a precise fit, it is very useful to use clamps to position the sides to the melamine, and then drill pilot holes into which you drive your screws.

A piece of two by four was screwed to the back to give the table its tilt.

I am working on a machine design myself. I have several scoring holes worked into the design that lead to a completely hidden underlevel. It is inclined and has an "onramp" at the bottom that randomly puts the ball back into play behind either flipper.

I considered that, but where do they go? Hmm... if I had some ramps up to a platform (or a "second floor" of sorts), the ball could fall through various holes in that and still be in play... I think we're on to something here!

Thanks it really is wild looking!!!!! Everything is made of wood except for the rubberbands we used. Wood carvings, air brushed back it was truely and adventure to build. As I said in an earlier post a TV news station came and did a video on the project. But no I do not have any video or photos of the steps. Under the situation these guys are in everything has to be approved. All I can share is the photos and video from the TV station.

THIS IS SO AMAZING! I'm doing this ASAP! omgosh so cool. I know what your talking about too, i have so much random stuff laying around that i know i will use later so i don't throw it away haha. Kind of an issue though. :S

you could extend the launcher slightly further than the end of the table so that you can add a ramp chute type thing to reload it automatically also i see that on most pinball machines they have a thing so if you dont launch very hard the ball rolls back down and out through a downward aiming chute

new brainwave! you could put all the "features" on a separate surface so you could remove a good setup and play a different level also if you want to set up a new feature but it doesnt fit and you dont want to mess up your good current one

I did a similar project in my tech class, Its fully run by a PLC, with 12 unique inputs and 8 unique outputs, a score board that counts up to 99 and a automatic launcher, pneumatic flippers, spinning objects, hidden switches and combos,. Did i mention its all custom machined from scratch?

im posting the pictures and videos of it in 2 weeks. It also has a coin counter. It took 3 months of hard work

They're about 8 or 9 inches. They needed to be long enough to extend out of the table, but short enough to stop the forward motion of the flippers. If you're making one of these, you'll probably need to just test fit and use the length that works for you.

hmm. I was thinking you could add a score counter to your machine by using a pedometer. Simply put shock switches inside all the bumpers you want to give points for hitting and wire the to them to the shock switch inside the pedometer. (a shock switch is simply a momentary contact switch made of a metal peg surrounded by a metal spring)

How about the launching ramp sends the ball through a hole in the back wall, and in the back wall there are 3~4 holes, and behind the back wall there's that "Plinko" ramp, wich sends the ball to one random hole? Oh, and you could put a ramp to send the ball to that "Plinko" behind the back wall without atcually launching it!*storm of ideas*

I spent about $10 on small stuff I didn't already have, like nuts, bolts and drawer pulls. The rest of the stuff was scrap stuff I had around. If you're a good scrounge, you could do this for pretty cheap. Good luck!

Does this make you the Pinball Wizard or what? You are that for sure. For your open space in the top left try a penalty ramp that leads either to the plinko board or flows back down a ramp aimed directly between the paddles. If you curve the floor of the ramp as the ball exits, that will give a bit of randomnous (spellcheckers says I made a new word) so that it may or may not be exactly center of the paddles.

Super!Awesome!Cool! But add some electronic stuff like lights. Use an old MS-DOS PC(486DX2 works well) + LPT port as a controller. I can help you with programming for LPT using Turbo Pascal.And with creating circuitry too! Just mail me at NOSPAMvladkorotnev@mail.ruNOSPAM (don't forget to remove NOSPAM from the address)

Thanks, I'm glad you like it! Yes, a steampunk version would just be awesome. I'm not a big steampunk fan, but I can see how really cool this particular contraption would be if it looked like a funky brass mess of tracks and ramps with all sorts of bells and whistles (literally!). Maybe I'll make a "Steampunk Pinball Table" if they ever have an appropriate contest for it. Or maybe I'll just make one anyway. Hmmm. The gears are turning...

I disagree. I think the whole novelty of the thing is that there ARE NO annoying lights or sounds. It's personal taste of course (note the number of people suggesting LEDs and such), but the primitive nature of it is what I find appealing. (And don't we already have an overabundance of lights and sounds in our lives?!)

If you were inclined to make some more noise makers in it, maybe some along the lines of bells and small drums would be the way to go IMHO. A small drum for the ball to hit after the spinner ramp would be neat. Great work.

I really like this project and don't think you should bow to the public's insistence that you add electricity. Though more wooden, re-used "noise-makers" would accentuate the piece. I've also never cared about scoring "points" so the absence of a scoring system is just fine. What I would like to see is more state-changing devices: flip-flops that toggle when the ball rolls through them; walls that fold up or down when the ball passes over them; a ball-catcher that only releases the ball when a subsequent one triggers it; etc. Your design lends itself to infinite and unending modification. It'll probably look pretty crazy in a few months if you keep modding it. As a child I took a summer class, the over-arching theme of which I've long since forgotten (had to do with simple engineering, though), in which we made (among other things) a pinball table very similar to what you've done here (ours was all corrugated cardboard, paper and wood glue - we were a little too young to be trusted with power tools). With more time and space I would enjoy building something like this. (I do have a new niece. Maybe she would like a nice toddler-friendly, wooden pinball game in a couple years?)

Thanks for the comment. I haven't worked on it much since posting this, but you're thinking along the same lines as I have been. I like the idea of having multi-functioning obstacles that work differently each time, and ones that make the ball perform differently depending on velocity. This thing's been pretty engaging and fun--in a basic, hot glue and cardboard sort of way.

Great Instructable. When I saw it, my first thought was if you built the table out of a sheet of steel you could have a box of pieces each with a magnet in the base to allow for free-form design and play testing. I like it simple without the lights and sounds, but modular pieces could be designed to be hooked together for beeping and flashing value. Again, great job. I'm building one of these as soon as my kid is old enough to understand how to play.

The is pretty neat, the ramps are very slick. Nice work. I've been slowly accumulating parts for a full size custom machine, if by some stroke of luck I win the Epilog I think I can make it a reality. I can see the appeal of the 'primitive' approach but for me the excessive lights and sound is what I remember most when I was a little kid. Now I can't even find a working public machine hardly anymore. :(

I hope you win the laser cutter. Your nerf tank is cool on so many levels! I secretly avoid getting into lights and sounds and stuff partly because it costs money, but mainly because electronics scare the hell out of me. (But there's so much information available now on how to do things, I probably can't use that as an excuse anymore!)

Adding electronics is addicting, it starts with something simple like LEDs and next thing you know you have no life. ;) Playing with low voltages is pretty simple and safe though, if you have any questions I can try and help.

The amount of awesomeness this 'Ible gives away is too much for words. I did build those flippers when i was a child, but never understood how to make the flippers (I used a little wood pice in my hand and went "arkanoid" on the ball). You simply rock mate :)

Wow, thanks for the compliments! I always tried to make stuff like this as a kid, and things never seemed to work the way I imagined. Now that I'm a 30 year-old kid with a little more patience and experience, I can sometimes hack together all the stuff I imagine!

Unfortunately, I think you'll need more tools that just a drill--unless you're a really good scrounger/repurposer. If you keep your eyes open, you may be able to find things that will get the job done for you.

I agree that this is awesome, great work man. however, i believe electronic scoring would make it much more fun, (and a little more competitive) and would be totally do-able. Maybe that's just me being new fashioned.

1. Taller walls with a cover made of plastic to keep the ball from flying off the table. Cut the plastic and place it so that when the ball drains you can pick it up and put it in the ball launcher. It would attach to the interior wall and only cover from the top of the table to the bottom of the flippers.

2. Original artwork on the melamine board. The alternate is to find a great piece of art, do an over sized printout of it, laminate it, and glue it to the board. If your creative this art could be the table theme. Add bumpers and ramps so they flow with the artwork.

3. More obstacles made from everyday items.

4. Scoring mechanisms.

5. LED lights. What's a pinball table without some annoying flashing lights all over the place?

6. Sound effects on bumpers or ramps. I don't know anything about this but something tells me this site has instructions on how to do it.

I hadn't given much thought to any artwork yet. It is kind of plain isn't it? Before I do any finishing work, I think I'm going to have to make the back and side walls much taller, and add more intricate loops and ramps and such. The paddle mechanism was the main thing I wanted people to see at this point. The paddles work much better than I had hoped!

electronic scoring is quite easy to achieve, you need some old cassete player, one which has a counter thingey on it, and remove the counter thingey, then using some wire/tape/whatever make it so that when the ball hits something it makes a contact which spins a fast motor which spin the counter thingey, man, i have this all planed out in my head, i wish i was skillful enough to build this :P

Thank you. (I do need to back off of those power shots a little!) I was surprised by how much velocity I could get out of those little paddles. I should make a much bigger table. There's potential for a lot of hours tinkering and playing around with this thing!